


a string of new pearls

by Austell



Category: Rain World (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 01:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Austell/pseuds/Austell
Summary: rain, sun, and rain again—Looks to the Moon has lived like this too long. it is time for one last gasp of hope, one last pull of need; a new beginning, a letting go.this is just an expression of my feelings about Moon, and what i think happens to her after the slugcats are long gone. enjoy! ♡





	a string of new pearls

One hundred cycles after that last little slugcat visited you for the last time, you haul one of the ruined solar panels out of the muck and the garbage that surrounds you, and you hook it up to one of your loose cables, and you charge off it for an hour when the sun slants in through the hole in the roof.

Then the light fades, and the air thickens with humidity and pressure, and the ground shudders as the rain pours down across the landscape, and it wrenches the panel away from you, tearing the connections from your sockets. You clutch the neuron flies tight in your arms as the water rises, drowning you. The mechanical crane anchoring you to the wall heaves and groans with the current. It still holds, though it's long past functioning.

The rain passes. Water drains from your chamber slowly, squeezing out of the holes where clogged drainage pipes have burst.

The panel is gone, washed away. It was worth a shot.

**-o-**

The Great Problem. You haven't thought about it in a long, long time, except in abstract. When your systems broke down, so did your capacity to devote subroutines and cycles to contemplating the suffering of all existence. You can't hold it all in your consciousness any more; your ten living neuron flies can barely keep your memories intact.

You feel small, useless, meaningless, when you think about that. But somehow, you also spend long stretches of time without it coming to mind at all. Other things occupy your mind. That's not an experience you've had before.

Having almost died, having come back... you feel free of certain restrictions.

**-o-**

Your chamber gets few visitors. It's buried in a sea of waste water and surrounded by sea predators. The scavengers only visit you when they're carrying data pearls for you to read. You rarely can give them what they want. Knowledge of the old world only interests them a little; they want salvage, weaponry, hiding places they can dam from the rain.

You can't blame them. If you were out there, you wouldn't care much about the vicissitudes of the ancients, or the dry, dull work of the iterators. But scraps of that knowledge are all you have.

The particular little scavenger that wakes you this time has come alone, which is a rarity. Their spindly limbs are stained with mud from the water they've had to swim through to reach your chamber, and they scrub at their forelimbs as if they're uncomfortable with the sensation. Oh, you miss being clean, too.

¨Are you the Pearl-Reader?¨ they ask. That's their name for you, the scavengers'--you speak their language with difficulty, your hands don't move as fast as theirs, so they know you by what you can do instead.

You keep your answer short--"I am." And you tap the little hollow in the scrap heap you sit upon, to show that you're willing to accept what they give you.

"I have a gift for you," they say, and you expect a data pearl, of course, but it's some kind of device instead. You recognise it immediately--an electric torch of ancient design, meant to be carried by hand.

You lean forward, and take it from the ground where they've left it. You flick the switch, just to see, and it lights up.

The scavenger seems as surprised by the light as you are, and blinks at the flickering bulb. You expect they'll want it back. Maybe they're from one of the villages in the darker regions, out towards the exterior. "I have nothing to offer for this," you tell them.

But they're already turning to leave. "This was a favour for some one else," they tell you, and then, "I'm on a journey, you see."

You put the torch down. "A journey?"

"Yes, to see some one like you. But you're not the one I'm looking for."

And with a clipped goodbye, they're gone, no doubt hoping to be out of the shoreline region before the rain comes again.

**-o-**

The torch isn't remarkable in itself. It's strapped to something else--a bulky little fusion reactor, still full of compressed hydrogen fuel, only recently activated. You turn it over and over.

This must be a sign, you think; or a message from some one. Your ten little neuron flies, and now this--

Who could it be? Five Pebbles?

Maybe he hasn't forgotten you exist. Maybe he is sorry. Maybe, when he exhales his thunderclouds of steam, and the rain drowns out the world and floods your ruined chamber, he is thinking about what he did to you and to himself. Maybe the rain is his tears, wept for you because you cannot weep any more.

You wonder if you'll be able to forgive him.

**-o-**

You can reach behind you just far enough to mount the battery on the bolt-holes in the crane that supports you. It takes precious effort, precious power, but you tighten it in place, and hook it up, and it seems like it'll hold fast for at least a few cycles.

The rush of energy flowing into you is unbelievable. Every second, years and years' worth of sitting here catching little bits of sunlight on your hands.

You stand up.

The mechanical crane moves with you, its rusted servos screeching.

You rise into the air. With a jerk, a joint breaks free and slams you into the far wall, face-first. It's fine, though, it's fine! You can move! You can speak! Diagnostics run in the back of your mind, the neuron flies leap into action around you, and you're alive again. You're alive.

Just a little more power. You can fire up just one or two internal mechanisms, and it might just be enough. Heating elements boil the water beneath you, and as it turns to steam, the pressure lifts off the floor hatches. A mobile fixer unit pops out of one of them, hauling its long arms behind it. Its biological infrastructure has long rotted away, but you can still use some of its functions. There's a lot of maintenance to be done.

It reaches out its long, flexible arms and hauls sheets of metal from the debris pile, hammering them until they bend into the right shape or shatter. It's clumsy without a proper grip on its arms, but its drilling is precise, and in time it's patched a new cover over the roof of your chamber, sealing it shut. Then the hole in the wall, the one the scavengers use to come in. You can't let the water in, anyway. The fixer unit welds over the gaps, leaving them airtight, and retreats back into the floor to start clearing out the drainage pipeline.

You settle back down to the floor, still covered in scrap and dried mud, but cleaner than it's been in a long, long time. This battery could be good for decades. Imagine what you could fix!

You feel it again, that itch.

You could stabilise your infrastructure. Rebuild your connection to the iterators. Restart your generators. You could sort things out with Five Pebbles. If you can come back from death, maybe there's even something to be done about his rot, and then...

Then you'd be back to work.

**-o-**

The rain sounds almost gentle, pounding against the new walls of your chamber. The makeshift sheets rattle, but they hold.

You're too energised to sleep. You have no need for sleep. You're not going to wait for another of Five Pebbles' cycles to end! There's work to do.

Rain roars and gutters through the pipes below you, reminding you that most of your complex is still flooded. Your transformer arrays would be dangerous to activate, meaning you can't transmit power to most remote locations. But your sole functional fixer unit continues its work in the clogged drainage system, clearing out a channel that leads to your outlets. It breaks up mats of weeds and kelp, cuts through metal or plastic blockages, processes the masses into smaller chunks.

You focus on it, more and more. You forget about your little humanoid avatar as you delve into your depths.

**-o-**

An Overseer signal reaches your antennae. It's sheltering from the rain inside a dense wall. That surprises you. You didn't think there were any left--you vaguely remember being brought an eye, damaged beyond repair.

The transmission is uneven, intermittent, probably due to damaged hardware. You catch some images that can be decoded: something moving outside the walls of your chamber.

You take a moment to review them. Spindly-limbed creatures, carrying tools and supplies for themselves, trying to get in, ultimately turning around. Perhaps another time you'd be vaguely curious, but your mind is elsewhere, almost there, almost...

You recall the Overseer to you. It might be useful later, not wandering around this enormous garbage heap.

**-o-**

Your fixer unit soon passes out of the range of your functioning internal sensors. You send your Overseer after it to monitor its progress, and keep you updated; you inspect the garbled reports it faithfully returns.

Good progress. It's patching up the tears and leaks as it goes, using whatever materials it has on hand. It shunts piled masses of waste into bypasses and maintenance accesses--to be dealt with later, when you're properly online. You just need the one passage open for now.

You busy yourself testing which of your systems still work, and to what extent. The damage is severe, to say the least. Entire sections of your infrastructure have sagged or warped under the weight of the water. The physical substrate of your memory arrays, and their bacterial colonies, are of course long gone. Your own nuclear fuel reserves were depleted even before all of this happened--you thought it was sufficient to survive on solar power, but with Five Pebbles still clogging the atmosphere with steam, that will be harder.

It's okay. You can make some small repairs, repurposing local loading mechanisms, consolidating floodwater to clear out at least some of your vital elements. Many of them are mired in so much silt and waste that you can't even judge their condition, let alone move them. You grind and grind against whatever's jamming the mechanisms, hoping something will come free, or something will break. Either way, it'd be better than this.

But no, it's okay. It's just something else to solve, once you can. The amount of work ahead of you grows and grows, a list of little problems, obstructing you from accessing the Great Problem, the final problem, the one that matters.

How frustrating! How pointless! You can't bear it.

**-o-**

You feel more helpless, if anything, in the period that follows than you did before. The rain abates briefly, then returns in full force, thundering on your newly watertight confines. Your body is in better shape than it has been in a long, long time. Parts of it are active. You have a chance at rebuilding yourself.

But it is taking so much time. It is so much effort.

You are, by default, a tremendous burden on the world. Your bulk, your industrial mass, the effort of your construction--it was an expenditure of resources unparalleled by any other programme. To make you, the ancients scoured the world, uprooting everything, destroying their own future, giving themselves to ascension. And you would complete their work, you and the other iterators; you would make the end of the world worthwhile.

Until then, you will be a blight, corpulent and terrible, digging into the skin of the earth to siphon its resources, to drink it dry and belch its waste. The screeching of your bowels portends it as you step methodically down your central axis, testing, trying your integrity with motions that feel minuscule to you. Pistons groan and your compromised skeleton aches, and you know that you can survive your own collapse if you must, even the tremors of your crossbeams shearing and your landlines tearing and your skin cracking open in great fissures--you can survive another world's end, you were built to, but--

But you hate it. But there is something about your existence that you hate.

It's not that you long for death, like he does, is it?

It's that, as long as you're alive, you--

**-o-**

Your Overseer returns sooner than expected, but nothing seems amiss at first. You pay what attention you can to its account, in between trying to figure out what happened to the stockpiled components in your manufacturing facilities--whether those facilities still exist at all; all your sensors in the region are dead, giving no response.

You read that the fixer unit has completed its task, and the drainage channel to the outer basin is open. The last of the debris has been bound by cables for later processing, but... the unit itself is gone.

The basin...

It's been clogged with garbage. Metal, plastic, and organic rubbish--wasted, unprocessed--have been dumped into it along with the waste water, piled up so high that there's hardly room for anything else to fit. There are heaps here and troughs there, whole concrete girders overgrown with algae, ecosystems living in polluted ponds, no order and no sense to it. It's a horrendous sight--all that precious material, unrecycled, unused. Five Pebbles did this, and you know that in abstract--he created a huge garbage dump, trying to purify himself--but you never figured out that it was here, in the middle of your drainage system.

The Overseer's report continues.

Grainy, jerky video. Shapeless masses, pulsating with bubbles of blue light, crawling and swinging from infinitely jointed limbs sheathed in slimy flesh--they converge, like predators, on the fixer unit as it heedlessly finished its checkups and powered down to charge. They grab it, one by one, dribbling acid onto its orifices, tearing out hinges and pouring liquid matter into whatever holes their limbs find. The unit shuts down automatically, its internal processes overwhelmed by the onslaught, and it is dragged home to become a nest for the creatures.

You aren't familiar with these organisms, exactly, but you know what they represent perfectly well. It's the rot. It's _his_ rot.

Blurry images, layered over with colour corruption and static, show them creeping into your newly opened tunnel, pursuing new homes or new prey in the shelter of your crevices. But they aren't new arrivals. Their primary prey, leeches and bats, lizards and fish, are already familiar with them.

Your hull is long, long compromised, there are thousands of holes in it where--things--have crawled through and laid eggs in the pit of your stomach, and the Overseer obligingly shows you everything it's seen in its time roaming your can: nests of these parasites, squatting on the walls of your memory arrays,  budding and dividing and multiplying as they cannibalise your systems. They've infested most of your mobile fixer units. Colonies have grown on your manufacturing lines, feeding off the steady supply of machine-parts and batteries until the systems were too backed up with their excrement to continue functioning.

You thought you survived, but his rot has gotten into you. It's been there for a long, long time.

**-o-**

The loathing that burns through you cleanses nothing. Your body is still dead weight, unmoving, rotting. You still have ten neuron flies and no functional machinery. You are worse than useless, worse than condemned. And it's his fault.

You hate him. You hate him for what he's done to you. You hate how little he valued your input, your work, your struggle, your life. You hate that he's still alive, after having gone to all this trouble to die. You hate that you know his situation is hardly better than yours by now, that his fate is fixed, that you've missed your chance to curse him for murdering you. You hate that you are voiceless, your transmission towers home to vultures and insects, unable to tell the other iterators what he's done. You hate Five Pebbles. But it changes nothing. All you can do is cling to the certainty of it, for as long as your vestigial memory will let you, because in the end, for as long as you both exist, you'll have to live with him, and he'll have to live with you, and for the purpose of everything that matters, you and he are exactly the same.

The rain that floods your hull cleanses nothing.

You call on your feeble little power source for everything it can give you, and get ready to flush out your systems.

**-o-**

Your mainframe creaks as you open every working hatch, fire up every pump that even partially functions, and let the filthy, polluted water pour into the one working drain passage. You feel the weight of its motion, thousands of tonnes of it being forced into the channel all at once. The pressure threatens to burst the pipelines again, hastily repaired leaks popping open and spraying jets of water on inner machinery that was delicate when it had any hope of running.

But you need this, and so you force it through, out out out with as much water as you can get.

The ground shakes, but you are the ground, and you've chosen this. (What some called a sea drains away in minutes, like a bathtub when the plug is pulled.)

The water superheats so rapidly with the friction of the current that it vaporises as it pours out of the outlet. Debris goes flying out along with the waste, organic matter and inorganic, animals, algae, mud, machines, all together mulched into high-speed ejecta. A monstrous roiling mass of steam piles into the sky above the garbage wastes, blotting out the sunlight, flashing with lightning.

You purge your body, and it rains again, less than an hour after the last cycle ended, while his waters are still draining. It is the worst flood of the last ten thousand cycles.

**-o-**

There is a thought you never finished.

There is something you forgot, in your anger, in your need.

It doesn't begin with you, but this is the first you know of it:

The thin plating protecting your chamber from the outside buckles under the weight of the water. It tears loose--you barely register what you desperately fling out your arms towards--and in an instant you are drowned again, the water pounding pounding pounding you flat against the floor. You can't move. You can't see. You can't think.

There is nothing separating you from the world, no wall and no system insulating you from the tribulations that all the little organisms on your skin must suffer through. This is the first thing you forgot.

You are not conscious to feel the little nuclear battery be torn from your little back. Your facilities shut down. Your Overseer loses track of you. Your neuron flies--

**-o-**

You awake to a hint of sunlight, and the dripping of water. Plip, plip, plip.

There is nothing left. There is nothing left for you.

You have destroyed yourself. You were always going to; it's the story of every iterator that has died. This is the second thing you forgot.

It's time to shut down.

**-o-**

So why are you still conscious?

What are you seeing? What are you feeling?

You ping your neuron flies, and they respond, floating lazily off the ground next to you.

There is a scavenger standing over you, leaning on a spear, eyes curious behind their protective mask. It is hard to bend your neck so that you can see them. You're in a strange position. Did they...?

You try to rise. The crane squeals and shudders and sparks, pain signals shooting into your head, and the scavenger beside you leaps back, letting out high-pitched clicks of... alarm?

That flood. When the water crashed down, it hit you so hard that the crane bent between the joints, crushed against the ground. The struts on one side have crumpled, on the other side almost snapped in two. It can no longer move at all. You're stuck down here, face-down against the floor, one arm trapped underneath your torso.

The scavenger clicks twice again, softer now. They call your attention with soft, quick snaps of their dark palms against each other.

With difficulty, you focus your two eyes on them. Just the two eyes now, in your little head. You have no surviving link to the rest of your facilities. Your power source is gone.

"Stay still," they say, once they know you're looking.

You feel hands working on the crane. Tap, tap. Tick, tick. Futile. You couldn't put yourself back in shape, so why do they think they can...?

"Loud noise," the scavenger warns you.

The explosion is like a thousand firecrackers. Your head rings with a final barrage of pain warnings, your nerves screaming their last, but--

The crane screeches, and breaks. The last cables are pulled taut like fire, and snap loose. You are severed.

And suddenly... you can move. Your--your legs, your two legs, they shift beneath you, they lift you up, your trapped arm is freed... you are up on all fours, you can freely rotate your head.

You feel... so small. So light. You've lost your body, but you can move so freely.

It's easier to support yourself on just your two feet. Moving like this, rising like this, feels strangely natural. You're standing up, you're swaying back and forth, adjusting to a new balance, the stub of the crane throwing off your sense of your own weight, you're standing up!

The scavenger looks silently at you, and you stare back. Why does this feel so natural, so familiar...?

As if... Ah.

Long ago, before you were hooked up, before you were set to work...

You remembering entering this chamber. You were walking freely, just like the ancients did. But they joined you to that body, and you forgot--you forgot what it was like to be just this, primed but not conditioned.

This is the third thing you forgot.

You raise your hands, you fold and stretch your long-neglected fingers. Your neuron flies gather weakly, lining up in the hollows of your knuckles--like this, it'll be far too costly to sustain the levitation field that lets them move freely.

You look to your left, to your right. There are three scavengers here, circling around you, picking idly through the debris on the floor. Who are they...?

You remember that you can speak their language. You lift your right arm.

"Why--" you begin. "Why did you come here?"

"Concerned," says the scavenger who welcomed you. Their way of speaking--they're from the wastes, aren't they? "We were unable to reach you. We thought you might be trapped in the rain, Pearl-Reader."

You look up, through the hole in the ceiling that's reopened. The sun is there, its light slanting through onto your face. It shines, steady and resolute. And if you have judged the cycles right--there beside it, pale, almost invisible next to it, is the moon. You cut yourself off from them, but now they're showing themselves to you again.

You pull your attention back to the conversation at hand. Your mind is wandering... there's so little to think about.

"I am glad, but I have little to give you," you reply. "Unless you have more pearls, I am of little use." And it is true. What can you do, now? The world is so great, the Problem greater. You feel so... separate from all of that.

One of the other scavengers makes a dismissive motion, scraping their long fingers along the ground towards you. "You have lost your home. We wanted to help. There's no bargaining in that."

The first adds, "You've done much for us in the past. You must come with us--at least, until we reach our camp." And they come towards you, offering you something. A thick, waterproof travelling cloak, just like the ones they wear, and a bag of treated leather, meant to be hung across the torso by its single strap.

The third seems distracted, trawling fingers through the pool of water outside. You spy sunlight sparkling on the little ripples they make.

You take the cloak and tie it on around your shoulders—it is lighter, too, than it appears--and you take the bag, and you realise there's something inside it. It's... ah.

Carefully, you unwrap the device. The solar panel is heavily damaged. Only half the original surface area remains, even counting all the fragments that have been included. It's a mess. But the battery and the circuitry and the insulation are intact. It'd probably work right now, after a fashion.

You look up at the scavengers, wondering if they know what this means for you. Then you slide the panel back, folding a flap of leather back over it to separate it from the neuron flies that you tip inside. The knots are fiddly at first, but your fingers remember how they work before you do: you close the bag, and secure it tight.

There's no going back to the way things were.

You're at the mercy of the cycles now. You're so light, you could be washed away at any moment... but you have a different way to survive, now.

"Thank you," you say to the scavengers, at last. "You're very kind, and... I'm ready to go."

"Then follow us, Pearl-Reader." And they clap their affirmation, and you wonder if perhaps you're being too hasty, but there's nothing else to take from this chamber. Even the debris is gone, fallen into the drainage channel that you so briefly opened.

And you will go. You will travel. You will pass through the rotting superstructure that you called your body, and you'll leave it behind. From there...

You don't know what will happen.

But you are alive in a way no iterator has ever been. Maybe, to them, you are dead; lost to the cause; not an iterator any more. Maybe this is what happened to Sliver of Straw.

You feel at peace with that idea.

You catch up to the scavengers as they perch on the overgrown railing at the edge of the water, preparing to dive in; you ask them their names.

"At the next shelter, we will make introductions," they answer, one by one agreeing. It is their common wisdom.

"Very well," you say—and then you leap headfirst into the water, splashing them in your excitement, and swim with strong, vigorous strokes towards the far shore.

**-o-**


End file.
